The next two novels, both American and both published in 1920, made relatively brief but quite significant additions to variant literature. By a count of lines, Kate Chancellor occupies little space in Sherwood Anderson’s _Poor White_, story of a shanty-town boy’s rise to prosperity and a good marriage. But she supplies the most vivid thread in the pattern of his wife’s emotional development. When Clara leaves her father’s farm for the state university she is wholly uninformed in matters of sex. From some bungling early experience she is wary of men, though conscious of a certain power over them. The relatives with whom she lives while in college play little part in her life save to repeat her father’s misunderstanding of trivial “petting” incidents which are unsought and distasteful to her. Clara finds her college courses no help toward the practical conduct of life in any field, and her one fruitful contact is with a girl two or three years her senior who plans to study medicine. Kate Chancellor, as masculine as her musical brother is effeminate, is quite frank in admitting her homosexual nature (thus implied to be innate), though she never mentions lesbianism. For three years the girls are constantly together. Their avid discussions range through politics, religion, and philosophy, but center most often on sex differences in temperament, and the problem facing all women in marriage: how to continue as individuals and not become mere colorless stereotypes like most housewives of their acquaintance. Kate is more drawn to Clara than to any other woman she has met, dreads marriage for the girl, and yearns to take her along as companion in the free and purposeful life she means to live. But she is honest enough to admit that her own pattern is not Clara’s, and that to bind her emotionally would only increase the groping girl’s confusion. Her closest approach to physical expression occurs during one of their customary walks together, when to drive some point home she stops and takes Clara by the shoulders. For a moment they stood thus close together, and a strange gentle and yet hungry look came into Kate’s eyes. It lasted only a moment and when it happened both women were somewhat embarrassed. Kate laughed and taking hold of Clara’s arm pulled her along the sidewalk. “Let’s walk like the devil,” she said, “come on, let’s get up some speed.”[39] On her return from college Clara becomes involved at once in the business of getting married. She manages to resist her father’s pressure toward a match profitable to him, but soon is plunged by circumstance into marriage with the book’s main character—the union is emotionally a premature step for both of them. Throughout this troubled period Clara tests all that happens against her memory of Kate’s honesty and gentleness, and on her wedding night itself, offended by the crude “surprise party” sprung by the farm hands, she thinks of Kate, “who had known how to love in silence.”